


Cairns

by barghest



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: ??????? what else, Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Past Character Death, i guess so bc yeah, mmm yes inhale and taste them feely feels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-14
Updated: 2015-09-14
Packaged: 2018-04-20 20:15:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 681
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4800800
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/barghest/pseuds/barghest
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I'm not dead, apparently - post-Fury Road, Max honours his fallen friends and family with a Scottish tradition, which is out of place in Australia, one supposes, but I'm both Australian and Scottish so heck on you.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cairns

**Author's Note:**

  * For [George Miller](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=George+Miller).



Max disappears into the dunes for forty days and forty nights after their return to the citadel, the shadow of his supply pack stretching long fingers across the sands when the sun grows low in the sky. He wanders where only the lizards, malformed and hissing, skitter at his feet, his throat scabbing over as the blood bag is sewn closed.

The Imperator begins to wonder if he was a mirage, stretched over old bones and stretches of weathered leather. A bleached tree, stained with bullet powder and blood, who followed in their eye line in their escape. She watches the horizon for him as every day closes.

He returns with stones.

Smooth pebbles sheltered by the rough curves of his knuckles, all sizes, weighing down his pack. Furiosa raises an eyebrow, familiar now with Max’s strange logic and wordless gesturing, taking the stone that he hands her and turning it over in her hands. Her brow creases into a frown, and she looks back at him. Max just shrugs, hands twitching without dropping the rock still in his hand.

“I don’t get it,” she barely gets the word out before he reaches across jerkily, snapping the stone from her fingers, thumbing over the curve of it upwards facing side. Placing it flat in his hand, Max glances to her, then to the stones as he balances one atop the other, then to her again.

“Cairns,” he says simply, retrieving another pebble from his pocket and stacking it on the others. “Make cairns.”

Rock piles reaching up towards the sky - Max shows them with his hands, lacking the working vocabulary and the confidence to use his words to describe the monuments he wants to build to the ghosts they left behind in the sand. A little church of stones praying to the dawn and the dusk for every soul that they left on the fury road. Capable investigates on the second day of building, her war boy heavy boots and leather jacket clinging to her dress as she asks Max what he is building.

“Cairns,” Max pushes a hand through his hair, voice the gruff rumble it is when he’s shy. “Cairns to remember.”

They line them in a wide semi-circle near the beginning of the road, where their shadows will walk across the desert long into the night. Max brings back more rocks for their piles, stacking and building doggedly until his fingers shake with tiredness and the flicker of his torch is too dull to see with. One of the history people, slithering from the depths of serfdom, tells Furiosa that cairns have many meanings, from trail markers to landmarks of their own - he lets her read it from the backs of his knees - and that it comes from other places, where the rain falls hard and sideways, and the lands are high, and the people are green and softly spoken. It’s far away, beyond the salt and further still.

Furiosa thinks of the green place. Perhaps out there lies another, where the people match the earth.

Max builds one last cairn.

It’s a little one, as tall as Max’s waist and not a small, frail hand higher. He handles every stone like it’s a child’s shoe, soft leather instead of smooth pebble, tiny buckle where crystal breaks the rock’s surface. He builds it in the shade, refusing assistance and hunching over it protectively when anyone passes too close. His hands are soft when he shores the sand up around it, a little tower that his fingers seem to ache to hold.

He places a seed in the dirt at its base, taking water out to it every day, doggedly caring for the barren earth he has so much faith in. Furiosa does not press, watching his brows furrow when a palm sized pebble breaks loose - Max sets it back in place, tender.

A tiny sprout crawls from the earth, stretching towards the sun. “Cairn,” Max mumbles, scratching at his hairline as he stoops beside the speck of greenery, watering it gently, “she would have liked to see them.”

**Author's Note:**

> A cairn is a human-made pile (or stack) of stones. The word cairn comes from the Scottish Gaelic: càrn (plural càirn). Cairns are used as trail markers in many parts of the world, in uplands, on moorland, on mountaintops, near waterways and on sea cliffs, as well as in barren deserts and tundra. They vary in size from small stone markers to entire artificial hills, and in complexity from loose conical rock piles to delicately balanced sculptures and elaborate feats of megalithic engineering. [...] In modern times, cairns are often erected as landmarks, a use they have had since ancient times; but, since prehistory, they have also been built for a variety of other reasons, such as >>>burial monuments


End file.
